librehardwaremonitor/librehardwaremonitor

Libre Hardware Monitor is a free, open-source Windows application that reads live data from the physical components inside your computer and displays it on screen. It shows temperatures from processors and graphics cards, fan rotation speeds, voltages, current load percentages, and clock speeds for CPUs and GPUs. This lets you see at a glance whether your computer is running hot, how hard it is working, and whether cooling fans are spinning at expected rates. It can pull readings from a wide range of hardware: Intel and AMD processors, NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel graphics cards, hard drives of various types (spinning disks, solid-state drives, and NVMe drives), motherboards, and network cards. Because different motherboard manufacturers expose sensor data in different ways, the project actively relies on user contributions to improve accuracy for specific hardware combinations. The project ships two things. The first is a desktop application with a graphical interface that any Windows user can download and run. The second is a library called LibreHardwareMonitorLib, which developers can add to their own C# applications via NuGet (a standard package manager for .NET) to read hardware sensor data programmatically. A short code sample in the README shows how to open a connection, walk through detected hardware, and print sensor values. Some sensors require the application to run with administrator rights, because Windows restricts low-level hardware access. The README notes a warning: there is an unaffiliated website using a similar name, and users should avoid it. The software is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, which allows free use and modification while requiring that changes to the library itself remain open source.